Software Testing Tutorials and Videos

Switching to Test-Driven Development (TDD) on an existing project without tests presents special challenges. Code could be a tangled mess of dependencies that defeats the very concept of unit testing. Or somebody attempted TDD in the past and you have a test suite that needs to be fixed before any new tests can be written. This video describes techniques that you can use to bootstrap a test-driven process into your project. Read more

How to get started with TDD? Test-First Teaching is an innovative teaching approach that is gaining widespread adoption. Sarah Allen talks about how she teaches Ruby and Rails through a test-first approach. She demonstrates test-first teaching and then discuss how to turn the corner from simply making tests pass to how to use a test-first approach to software design.

Ask experienced Rails developers what they think about mock objects and some will say “absolutely awesome” while others “absolutely horrible.” The problem with both of those answers lies their “absolute”-ness. Used appropriately, mock objects are a powerful design tool that can lead to highly maintainable applications. Used in the wrong context or for the wrong reasons, they can lead to painfully brittle test suites that do little to maintain confidence in an application. In this talk, David Chelimsky will explore mock objects in the abstract and in the context of Rails.

Rails has powered Oakley.com, a site generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue for the past two years. It has 80 models, an equal number of controllers, 75k lines of code…and no tests. I will talk about how we’ve been chipping away at growing an effective, valuable test suite since I’ve come on with Oakley. How can we take a mass of untested code that runs our businesses, and start working to the ideal of high-quality, malleable, tested code, while still meeting the demands of high productivity in our daily work? My talk will get people thinking and talking about that process, and give them practical techniques for making it reality

This is the second of two episodes where we learn the basics of Load Testing our web applications. In this episode we take a look at autobench, a tool that automates our httperf load tests, then we’ll figure out how to visualize our httperf results in a graph, and finally take a brief look at a few other Load Testing tools you might want to get familiar with.